Reviews with content warning for Murder - What Kind of Mother

Reviews tagging 'Murder'

What Kind of Mother by Clay McLeod Chapman

9 reviews

nikkidomino92's review against another edition

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dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

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_weirdreads13's review against another edition

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dark slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

This book was a failed lecture for me. The premise of a hand reader discovering the truth about the disappearance of a child through the father's hand... SIGN ME IN!

The second, third and fourth part of the book (I believe) were good amazing and intriguing. But here was the problem I found with my lecture: just when the book was getting intriguing, the plot was getting somewhere, the depth of the characters and the problem was showing off... we hit the ending of the book.

Just when Madi Price started to develop what could be between her and Henry McCabe the issue of the characters and the book, we just got it with death and the ending of the book. I felt this book was rushed for the amazing premise the blurb of the book said. I wish we could see more of Madi's struggle in accepting that Skyler was not real, but she grew attached to the kid she found with Henry; and more of Henry's struggle with the grief of losing his kid, finding the a replacement of his "kid", and the conflict of knowing that when he think is his son it's not his son and is a monster. A mother and a father on opposites, meeting in the middle once and then back again to opposite. I would also would have loved to see Skyler's "doppelgänger" confused about how he is been treated by Madi and Henry and what his nature dictates, which would have been amazing to explore the loop hole of nurture vs. nature.

Another point of the book was that it was inspired in Godfather Death. A part of the story was added (paraphrase) in the story... but I don't see any correlation between the story of What Kind of Mother and Godfather Death. Which could be a missing character that could kind of mend the conflict between Madi, Henry and Skyler, but we never got it (which could also be Madi the "godmother" of Skye, while Henry and Grace struggle with the conflict of the new Skyler.

The book really had amazing potential, but was not completely executed and the topics where not fully develop and left me, the reader, craving more and more of the development of the characters and the story they could live through the pages of the book.

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hauntedantiqueshop's review against another edition

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dark mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

Can’t even lie, they really had me in the first half of this book. There’s some really good horror imagery in this, I really loved the marine life aspects. I totally get why it’d be classified as a southern gothic folk horror and it does work for a while but it gets overshadowed (for me at least) by alternating unreliable prospectives, the weird focus on motherhood instead of parenthood when there are multiple parents in the story, and then that anticlimactic ending.

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